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121 - Finding the Talisman Mistress [Cherno]
🕑 Added 2023-08-23 02:36:40 +0000 UTCMeticulous, yet stilted writing in the Calbian alphabet read:
You may use this talisman as a compass to find me.
Bring Silberblut if you believe him to be trustworthy.
The moment Krahe finished reading, the glow faded and it fell into her hand. Curious, she funneled some Thauma into it, and found that it came alive once more, glowing faintly and sending her a sense of direction. A mental compass, subtler than the floating pointer she had expected. Moreover, from the moment she had found the message talisman, the Tarnished Jade Flower Mark had begun fading, and fast. She returned to her rented domicile, and by that point, the feeling of the mark’s presence had already vanished. When she checked, she found it to still be there, but it rubbed off with barely any effort.
After she finished with her meal, she went right to the safehouse and soon met up with Casus.
“Good news, I got in contact with the Talisman Mistress and I have a means of finding her. Mixed news, she wants me to bring you along, meaning that, at bare minimum, she has accurate intel on the Slaughterhouse 9 Incident.”
After a few moments of quiet thought, the Banisher said: “Alright. I will finish my coffee and we can go. A few of my acquaintances have been curious about the Talisman Mistress, anyway.”
And just as he said, so it was. They went by foot, using hidden paths and back alleys as always, eventually reaching an out-of-the-way, yet not exceptionally obscure part of the city. Yao’s talisman directed them down an alleyway, unsurprisingly, and so, down it they went.
It was, to no surprise on either of their parts, that the doors and windows of the surrounding buildings swung open, and out came hostile men wielding weapons of various sorts, from swords to guns. An ambush. But why? Surely, Mistress Yao wouldn’t try to use bottom-of-the-barrel goons like this to deal with the two of them.
Casus transformed in a flash, and engaged three of the five, rapidly cutting them to bloody shreds.
She blasted one with a short Cinder Strobe. He was dead on the spot, fried into the wall, flesh fused to melting stone. Another, charging right down the middle, met his end by way of Wandrei Faust. Something felt a bit off. They didn’t raise Barriers at all, and their Wards didn’t unravel as much as they collapsed all at once. That was not to mention the copious quantities of blood spilling across the ground from just two corpses. Krahe didn’t mind.
In fact, she eagerly flooded the alleyway with rancid, isotope-laden smoke, and under its cover summoned Barzai as she began forming the Daemon Core’s outer shell. The Wound-like Grin’s opening down the length of her chest turned a small tear from earlier into one which spanned most of it, and the raven erupted from the maw. Right away, he nestled himself in the quickly-growing hemisphere of black tendrils that floated above her outstretched left hand. Then, he imploded, and as the hemisphere grew closer to fullness, Krahe strode out of the smoke, ready to fry any takers.
Seven more attackers had appeared, with Casus casually keeping four of them at bay at once, yet again, something felt wrong. Krahe tried to set Barzai upon them, but just like the raven had done before, it refused, extricating itself from its nest and returning into her. Casus echoed her realization a moment later after decapitating three of their attackers at once: “Something is off. I can’t tell what, but I’m fairly certain these aren’t real people.”
“An understatement if I’ve ever heard one,” Krahe deadpanned. She couldn’t help but smirk at the absurd juxtaposition of Casus’ cautious, logical statement, compared with the ridiculous scene he was in the middle of. Three corpses, still standing, their necks fountaining absurd amounts of blood, while their comrades just… Performed idle animations. That was the only appropriate description. They were idling like goons in some shovelware capeshit tie-in game.
Slow clapping, accompanied by the clack of wooden shoes against stone - perfectly synched up, in fact. The illusion fell away; clothing gave way to layers of yellow-red paper with pallid, dead flesh showing through the gaps. These weren’t living men, but… Puppets? No. Corpses. Corpses mummified in layers of talismans, moved about like puppets, and still gushing far more blood than any living human contained. They never had any Wards at all, but a layer of protective talismans that was burned away in places where it had felt like their “Wards” had collapsed. No real facial features could be seen, either.
“I must admit, I’m impressed and disappointed at once!” came a husky, mature woman’s voice. The fallen began to move again, dragging themselves to their feet and, in the case of Krahe’s victims, peeling themselves off the walls. “I had hoped that it would take you until the fake graft-beast to uncover my little puppet show. Come, we have much to discuss. Don’t worry about them, they’ll clean up after themselves.”
She saw a wood-and-wire scaffold under the melted skin of the men she’d Cinder Strobed. Nothing inside but a great big bladder seeping with blood.
They only got an ever so brief glimpse of the woman, but, neither of them feeling hostile intent from her, they followed. They saw no fake graft-beast along the way, probably because it was hidden, and Casus saw fit to detransform. Nonetheless, with disgust at the corpse-puppets, he commented as they walked: “...Depending on the methods, this is either borderline heretical, or highly fucking heretical.”
“Oh, they’re not real corpses. Far too much resentful energy, too difficult to work with. I cobbled those puppets together from a grafter’s waste solely for this little puppet show.”
“Merely objectionable, then,” Casus acquiesced.
Before long, she had led them into a two-story house that would’ve been utterly unremarkable, if it weren’t for the fact that this place had an ephemeral sense of privacy that Krahe had not felt anywhere other than one of the Church’s sanctums or inner chambers.
Finally, for the first time, the woman turned around and faced them.
“I apologize for the crude screening, but I simply had to be sure that you were true killers, rather than Zachariah’s ilk: Powerful, but only in theory. Now… Shall we get to business?”
